Comic 693 - Lock Blue Up- Page 7

Author Notes:

Eheh... Jeez, for all the pages I have to set up while I'm really tired. Erm... Okay, yeah. This is a bit of a bombshell. Actually, lemme get this out of the way; when we said we were gonna worldbuild, a lot of that is gonna involve Alex telling Grants the ins and outs of super-heroics. There's a couple of surprises planned but that's mostly the premise of this chapter.

Yeah. This is our stance on heroes killing criminals in our universe. Unpleasant but not entirely unavoidable. We're not trying to be edgey or dark, but we're just curious how this profession would actually work. And in a job like this, yeah, sometimes you might be backed into a corner. Martin established that's how heroes worked in this 'verse waaaay back in WaR's first chapter when Alex mentioned having killed before, we're getting a look at what that meant.

Was really, really looking forward to this speech. This is something that kinda annoyed me in superhero comics; killing a criminal is almost always the worst thing you can do, and there's always an aesop about lethal force. But these stories always frame use of deadly force as in execution contexts, not the result of an escalating fight.

In comic books lethal force is either never EVER right even if they're currently holding a knife to a baby's jugular, or lethal force is the only thing those punks understand and God can sort them out. In the real world, how and when to use lethal force is a complex issue and I didn't want to see it made black-and-white or framed simplistically.

I feel like I should say again, I'm not trying to make a political statement with the comic; I'm just trying to tell a story. This is just a look at lethal force I don't see heroes take (either they're scum who deserve it or killing is never, ever right) and I wanted to take it. I'm personally really in favor of increasing police accountability and gaaaah, I'm too tired to think about politics. Webcomics should be a no-politics zone.

Yeah, superheroes killing is pretty much considered acceptable territory within our comics, but not in like a, "Mow them all down, whatever," way. Sometimes in the heat of the moment people die, it happens and it's unavoidable.

Kind of weird territory to go in right off the bat like this, but I think it works out organically. Like Adam said, a large chunk of these two's interactions this chapter are about the ins and outs of the superhero community - whole lot of world-building that'll be going on in regards to that.